July 2008

As they did last year, the popular A List Apart publishes a survey for people who make websites. "Calling all designers, developers, information architects, project managers, writers, editors, marketers, and everyone else who makes websites. It is time once again to pool our information so as to begin sketching a true picture of the way our profession is practiced worldwide."

We can read some interesting things about the future of Aptana Jaxer in a blog post from Paul Colton (CEO of Aptana) announcing the hiring of Ajax gurus Greg Murray and Ryan Johnson. Apart from the fact that the Jaxer 1.0 release candidate will be available in a matter of days, we also learn that Jaxer will support "ActiveRecord-like JavaScript ORM for Jaxer that promises to make working with JavaScript data a pleasure".

According to ZDNet, Microsoft Senior Vice President of Online Services and Windows (what a mouthful), Bill Veghte, just told attendees of the Microsoft's Financial Analyst Meeting (FAM) that Microsoft will release the final version of Internet Explorer (IE) 8 to the Web "later this year".

Back on the 2nd of July, Social CMS Buzz posted a list of 20 Of The Best CSS Navigation Menu Techniques, which contained an extensive list of CSS Menus. "One of the most important features of your website will be the navigation menu, not only do you want the menu to look good but it must be functional and instinctive to use. If your visitors cannot navigate your site easily and instinctively traffic and return visits will suffer, it can be a fine balance between usability and good navigation menu design". If that wasn't enough, they are now providing 20 More CSS based Navigation Menus For Your Projects.

The web is an immense source of information. You can learn, read, listen or watch just about anything. But let's not forget what we, humans, tend to do on our free time: we love to play! We just play with everything: gazillions of games have been created, both material or immaterial such as computer games. Many devices have been exploited and engineered for the sole purpose of entertaining people. And just when you thought this should be enough, someone had the idea of putting a game in your Favicon. Brilliant!

Vikram Vaswani writes a very nice article on how to use PHP to process and integrate data from Google Calendar into a custom application. "This article will introduce you to the Google Calendar Data API, showing you how to integrate and use calendar data with a custom PHP application. It includes examples of how to: Retrieve events from a user's public notebooks; Add new events; Modify and delete events; Search for events by keyword or date range".
The examples in the article will introduce you to the Google Calendar feed format, you how to search for calendar entries by date and keyword, explain how to add, modify and delete calendar entries and illustrate how to build a customized front-end to the Calendar service.

7 Days and 11 Hours is all that remains before the start of Google Code Jam 2008. Code Jam is a competition with a fair amount of money: $10,000 for the winner isn't bad, is it ? And if that is not enough, the first 100 contestants will win at least $250."Do you enjoy solving tough problems and grappling with technical challenges? Then enter Google Code Jam! Google Code Jam is a coding competition in which professional and student programmers are asked to solve complex algorithmic challenges in a limited amount of time. The contest is all-inclusive: Google Code Jam lets you program in the coding language and development environment of your choice."

Fabio Cevasco is taking us on a tour of Rails-Doc.org which focuses on providing a better interface to Rails documentation by offering two key features : a powerful, fast and useful document search and the possibility to add notes to Rails documentation.
Rails is extremely powerful and I share Fabio's view when he says "When you decided to learn Ruby on Rails (if you did, that is), chances are that you bought a book. I did, too, actually: there are a lot of very interesting and fairly comprehensive books out there after all. I actually never bought a book to learn PHP, in the past though. Why’s that? Well, for two simple reasons: the PHP manual can easily be searched and provides enough documentation, in most cases and when the documentation is not enough, there’s always plenty of comments by experienced developers to save your day."

Ajaxian, Antun Karlovac and Raju Bitter report that the 4.1 version of OpenLaszlo has finally been released and can now generate DHTML in addition to the already existing SWF output format. The project started in March 2006 and took the team behind this free Adobe Flex competitor more than two years of development... but the wait was worth it !

When the amazing Smashing Magazine won the Webinale Award 2008 with a price of 5000 €, they made a poll asking their loyal readers how they should spend this money. It turns out that we wanted more free stuff (who wouldn't ?) and free icons in particular. And they heard us by starting to provide more Icon relatedarticles. Today they are providing a list of 55 Free High Quality Icon Sets and the least we can say is "great stuff guys"!

You've obviously heard about Adobe AIR. But have you installed it yet or did you wait for some amazing application to require the AIR framework before installing it ? Well, that time might come thanks to the Lifehacker blog who have put up a list of the top 10 apps worth installing Adobe AIR for.

"Adobe AIR, a downloadable platform for running web-friendly apps on any operating system, is still pretty fresh on the market, but it already has a healthy number of applications in development or near completion. While many of them are simply desktop translations of web interfaces that were easy to use already, a handful of AIR apps truly make work and play easier, or just more interesting. Let's take a look at 10 applications that make it worth the effort of downloading and installing Adobe AIR."

Silicon Alley Insider reports that Adobe (ADBE) will make it easier for search engines to index more content in applications built with its Flash software. Previously, Google and Yahoo could index text and links in Flash animations and applications. Now, with some "optimized Adobe Flash Player technology," they'll be able to "uncover information" in Flash files "that is currently undiscoverable by search engines."

The never ending source of information which is Ajaxian is reporting the release of JSON Diff, a very handy tool to compare your JSON data. Just look at the following result screen shot to see the visual differences: